screened windows. By and by he ventured to peer into
this window. He saw three people: a young man at the piano, an
elderly man smoking in a corner, and a young woman reclining in a
chair, her eyes closed. The watcher's intake of breath was
sibilant.

It was she! The Dawn Pearl!

He vaulted the veranda rail, careless now whether or not he was
heard, and ran down to the beach. He gave an order, the proa was
floated and the sail run up. In a moment the brisk evening breeze
caught the lank canvas and bellied it taut. The proa bore away to
the northwest out of which it had come.

James Boyle O'Higgins knew little or nothing of the South Seas, but
he knew human beings, all colours. His deduction was correct that
the beauty of Ruth Enschede could not remain hidden long even on a
forgotten isle.

CHAPTER XXIV

Spurlock's novel was a tale of regeneration. For a long time to
come that would naturally be the theme of any story he undertook to
write. After he was gone in the morning, Ruth would steal into the
study and hurriedly read what he had written the previous night.
She never questioned the motives of the characters; she had neither
the ability nor the conceit for that; but she could and often did
correct his lapses in colour. She never touched the manuscript with
pencil, but jotted down her notes on slips of paper and left them
where he might easily find them.

She marvelled at his apparent imperviousness to the heat. He worked
afternoons, when everybody else went to sleep; he worked at night
under a heat-giving light, with insects buzzing and dropping about,
with a blue haze of tobacco smoke that tried to get out and could
not. With his arms bare, the neckband of his shirt tucked in, he
laboured. Frequently he would take up a box of talc and send a
shower down his back, or fill his palms with the powder and rub his
face and arms and hands. He kept at it even on those nights when
the monsoon began to break with heavy storms and he had to weight
down with stones everything on his table. Soot was everywhere, for
the lamp would not stay trimmed in the gale. But he wrote on.

As the novel grew Ruth was astonished to see herself enter and
dominate it: sometimes as she actually was, with all her dreams
reviewed--as if he had caught her talking in her sleep. It
frightened her to behold her heart and mind thus laid bare; but
the chapter following would reassure her. Here would be a woman
perfectly unrecognizable,